(1952/2008) David Brin, HarperCollins, £7.99, pbk, pp294, ISBN 978-0-006-47922-2
Even Edgar Rice Burroughs in the primitive 'Mars' books used to spin his yarns by using more than one character's viewpoint, breaking off the narrative at some dangerous point for one character to move to another to keep the page turning.
These days in the hands of such masters of modern space opera such as Roger Macbrade Allen, four viewpoints and more are not uncommon. But David Brin has pushed convention out of the airlock and his second 'Uplift' trilogy has innumerable of them, at least 15 in one of the novels/ In these circumstances it is almost impossible to write a coherent review and all one can do is to outline the general plotting of the whole series.
Brin began the original 'Uplift' trilogy in 1980 with Sundiver, followed by Startide Rising in 1983 and Uplift War in 1987. His superior five galaxy space opera is populated by dozens of different sentient life forms, but each galaxy has a 'patron line' who have taken upon themselves the obligation of uplifting a lower species, called 'clients', to a higher level: commonly from non-sentience to sentience. The client species is then indentured to their patron for years, after which it is assumed that they will have gained the wisdom to do some uplifting of their own.
This tidy arrangement is disrupted by the discovery of Earth which has naturally evolved sentient humans who have uplifted all on their own dolphins to the point of piloting spaceships. The humans are also working on other species such as chimpanzees. In the broader Galactic scheme of things this is all very anomalous and divides the extraterrestrial community into pro and anti-Earth camps. This first trilogy ends with a partial victory for the human and their small band of alien sympathisers.
Now comes the second trilogy: Brightness Reef (1995), Infinity's Shore (1996) and Heavens Reach (1998) and this has in the US all ben collected into a single volume entitled The Uplift War - The Second Trilogy. Alas here Brin has gone for this multiple viewpoint telling of the story. So not only is a good memory required but frequent reference to the character name index provided.
It all does not really work. The expansion lessens the grip of the intricate plotting. There is brilliant writing about individual characters, but overall the effect adds up to a very difficult read. It is almost impossible to give a straightforward plot summary and so I will not try. Suffice to say I hope that Brin reverts to a simpler style in future. An interesting experiment as this may have been, several hundred pages later it clearly represent much hard work by the author, and evidently for his readers too. Regretfully this reviewer gave up.
Vince (Vin¢) Clarke
[Up: Fiction Reviews Index | SF Author: Website Links | Home Page: Concatenation]
[One Page Futures Short Stories | Recent Site Additions | Most Recent Seasonal Science Fiction News]